The World Gone Mad

When you ride the train near daily, there is a certain inevitability regarding interaction with eccentric and extravagant personalities. These are mostly pot-heads, sometimes schizophrenics, but I was not prepared for the lizard people. It was something like stepping into the twilight zone, and it all started with this old tramp.

He looked bone thin; his head probably wouldn’t have come up to the height of my shoulders. Dressed in dirty clothes, he eased his massive pack off of his back–the thing might have matched him in weight–and onto the floor in front of his seat. He sat quietly, studying the polyglot notice. I myself had in times before and since derived some paltry pleasure by comparing the block of Russian text, or Japanese, or Portuguese, with the only language decipherable to me, English.

In a voice that made itself heard, he declared, “All these languages are so different they couldn’t have come from the same source. Best proof we’re all descended from different aliens.”

To my shock and horror, the compartment soon sung with approval of this garbage, like parishioners chanting amen to a sermon. Had no one heard of the Indo-European language? Well, those who do not speak are in agreement, and I can be very disagreeable. I’ll admit, something in me was furious at this mass foolishness.

“I don’t think so,” I interjected. “Respecting all the differences between the races of man you mentioned,” the man had listed others besides language, “the fact that successful interracial-breeding occurs, seems evidence that those are merely surface differences, and that a deeper brotherhood exists.”

Sitting down in a huff, for he was between a sitting and standing state in his excited recitation, he turned his back on me. Then, muttering so I could hear, “It seems closed minded not to believe in aliens.”

“I am not arguing against aliens,” said I, “I’m just arguing that your reasoning is faulty.”

Silence was his only reply to me. I was thereby put into Coventry. Yet, all around me, the riders of the train continued in their idiotic affirmations of the most ludicrous assertions, this little tramp’s never-ending fountain of conspiracy theories granting him some preferred status. They came to him with questions, and he never failed to have an answer.

Given the state of things, I half expected him to go the full mile and start into an anti-Semitic rant, an unfortunately common form of racism where I live. Well, that’s when things got weird. I was going mad listening to these people talk in detail regarding top secret government facilities, so secret only this old man knew all there was to know about them, when the whole conversation jumped the shark.

I soon learned that I was surrounded by lizard people. I had heard second hand accounts of these whack jobs, conspiracy theorists who believe the world to be run by humanoid lizards. The Papacy, the Royal Family, and the Bush family are reportedly populated by these aliens.

And more than that, our universe was something of a prison for these beings, a place they were let dominion over so that, hear me out now, extradimensional good beings could live in peace from them. If these lizards ever broke out, as they were trying to do, then these good extradimensional beings of goodness would destroy all our reality to purge theirs of our evil. I thinks that’s what he told us.

I was now too angry to speak. And truly, it was a marvelous anger. Why should I care that I was surrounded by fools? Was I angry for their sake? No. Something in me wanted to throttle this little man who had set himself up a comfortable verbal dictatorship. I think it was the falseness of it, the barefaced lies offended me to my core.

Then came the final straw. A pot-head joined the fray, perfuming our section with the nasty odor of skunk. He sat right behind me. The aroma was unbearable. Retreating to the other side of the train, I tried to cool off. Still, a fury inside me stormed.

There is no good ending to this story; that is about where it stopped. I still cannot figure two things: why I was so angry, and when exactly the world went mad.